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Instrumented GIMP To Identify Usability Flaws
Mike writes "New users of the GIMP often become frustrated at the application's unwieldy user interface. Now Prof. Michael Terry and a group of researchers at the University of Waterloo have created ingimp, a modified version of the GIMP that collects real-time usability data in order to help the GIMP developers find and fix its usability problems. Terry recently gave a lecture about ingimp and the data it collects. During each session, ingimp records events such as document creation, window manipulation, and tool use. A log of these events is sent to the ingimp server for analysis. The project hopes to answer questions such as 'What is the typical monitor resolution of a GIMP user?' and 'Is the GIMP used primarily for photo editing or drawing?'"
I like the idea, but will the folks who use ingimp be at all representative of the user population at large? ... Especially of the user population that would complain about accessibility / usability. Is it worth it or is anyone talking about making such a thing an integral part of any project?
take it easy, but take it.
So, if I invent a version that gives data on why the name sucks (the otehr main problem with the program), will the developers pay attention to that too?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I don't remember ever having a problem figuring out GIMP. But it would drive me insane if they start changing things around on me.
There are far too many anomalies of usability, lack of features and intricacies required for Gimp. Today, Photoshop is the industry leader, and anyone doing serious editing is using it. To be successful, Gimp must surpass it in more than one way (the one way being free). Kind of like what Firefox did to IE. Unfortunately, Gimp is no where ready for that. And I get a feeling that it is (heading to) nowhere.
... may be even Blender. The problem is that no one wants to be in the middle. Utilities need to rise to the top, or they face the fate of XMMS. I hope there will be a replacement in GTK too, just to show Gimp how to use the toolkit :)
I have been using Gimp for a long time. When I first installed Linux it was the only program everyone used to talk about. KDE's kolourpaint was not yet there for general purpose paint-brush replacement. I have used it for years under the hood of open-source fanboyism. And I think that is the reason why it has suffered. It had no competition, and now it is just a software which you don't want to open, again.
Now, I know it is not a paint-brush replacement. But it is neither a Photoshop replacement... and the middle land is already full of other utilities. Inkscape, Krita,
PS: posted this on journal before... this is shameless re-posting.
is in getting others to use the program because of its name. Lets have a contest to rename the GIMP.
I though so too. Until I started to use Photoshop, after that I know how to use GIMP a little better because I know of more things to find... But sience I have Photoshop now I rairly need to use the GIMP. GIMPs usability is its major flaw, it has many of the useful feature of photoshop but it is so clunky (and photoshop isn't a good interface) that I probably have made more money from using photoshop then the GIMP even after paying the high cost of photoshop because doing work take so much less time, that I could put it towards billable jobs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If they want to know how GIMP is typically used, that's easy. GIMP's typical and most popular use is for people to say, "Hey, you can edit your photos under Linux with GIMP, and you don't have to use Wine and Photoshop."
But professionals using GIMP for doing real work? That's atypical. Hopefully that will change.
You know, how do you recognize a project is someone's pet project? It's an overcomplicated solution for a problem with a trivial solution.
Want to find out what makes the GIMP ui suck? Ask the damn users! They won't exactly shy away from telling you.
I'm a Photoshop user and I have GIMP installed here to use the occasional esoteric plugin functionality. Let me tell you few things you can immediately get busy fixing:
1. for some reason GIMP developers decided every single thing needs its own window and its own menu bar. It's weird as f*ck: put the entire layout in a single window with integrated panel layout (similar to how Eclipse does it, for example).
2. each plugin is its own modeless exe dialog that takes arbitrary amount to start after it was called (at which time you can modify the processed image.. sometimes, and sometimes GIMP crashes because of it): create a proper lean plugin API and modal plugin dialog.
3. the menus and options are all over the place: there seems to be no strategy at all about what goes where
4. GIMP has really bad startup time, and performance, compared to commercial graphics editors (such as Photoshop)
5. There's no way at all to organize your layers in a more complex setup: there are no layer groups, layer folder, or anything like that. It's just a big sack of flat layers, that you can select one at a time, and link them together. This is Photoshop 4 level functionality, and most graphics editors are waaaay past that by now.
6. There are no proper drawing tools in Gimp at all. For a graphics package that claims to be targeted at geeks making icons and web devs making web designs, this is ridiculous. We're forced to fake our ways with selection tools and scripts, which covers only a fraction of what we need.
7. A personal issue I have with Gimp: no proper grid. I use the grid in Photoshop all the time, set on unobtrusive "pixel" mode, and usually at 8, 16, 32 pixels with subdivisors. In Gimp, no subdivisors, no pixel mode, and for some reason the *mere fast of displaying* the grid, makes everything slow down to a crawl.
The project hopes to answer questions such as 'What is the typical monitor resolution of a GIMP user?' and 'Is the GIMP used primarily for photo editing or drawing?'"
Looks to me like they're about to fall into the fallacy that caused Daimler-Chrysler to do a redesign of the Jeep line that killed their market.
The marketing department looked at what fraction of SUVs were actually used off-road. They came to the conclusion that it was small. So they redesigned their line to be more comfortable on-road at great cost to its off-road performance.
Turns out that a significant fraction of their market was people who NEEDED the off-road capability - and had the resources to pay for it, reliably buying cars, year after year, through all economic cycles.
Jeep stopped being the car they needed and became another clone of the rest of the market: "Mall Terrain Vehicles" that LOOK like an off-road car but are really just a funny-looking small/high van that qualifies as a "truck" to escape the fleet mileage regulations. Their guaranteed market went elsewhere and they were in head-to-head competition with a slew of vehicles over which they had no advantage.
Similarly, Coke looked at all the people buying Pepsi, saw that they were younger and that Pepsi's main difference was that it was sweeter, and replaced Coke with New Coke, which was sweeter yet. Result: People who drank Coke because they liked a less-sweet drink switched to Pepsi.
And then there was the high-ranking officer in WW II who spent months counting all the bullet holes on the returning bombers, then did a big presentation on how those areas should have armor added. At the end of his presentation a lower-ranking officer asked "Shouldn't we, instead, add more armor to those areas that are only lightly holed? After all, this sample represents only the planes that came back."
= = =
I think the same thing could happen here: Paying attention to what people do a lot of just focuses on what you're already doing right - at the cost of ignoring the things that people do occasionally, or only some people do, but which they need to have. Further, the things they do rarely may be used rarely specifically BECAUSE they're hard to use and the interface needs improvement.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And how do you define quality here?
From the looks of it, it seems you are implying that GIMP is not as good in 'quality' as PS. Of course, by quality, if you meant UI, menubars, you win. If you are talking about some good mathematical algorithms applied to my pixels to modify them the way I want, I am not sure how GIMP is inferior to PS. In fact, I find it better technically then PS. And add availability of lots of scripts and plugins people are developing.
And, I have used both of it. PS at work, GIMP at home.
That is an awful mistake for F/OSS fanboys. "Oh, it's free, so we shouldn't complain". This is like being blind to the problem. If it's free and it works, why isn't EVERYBODY using it? (In other words, why is Mozilla Firefox MUCH MORE popular than the GIMP? Think about it).
Sometimes we can forget that graphical applications are meant to be used by designers who use most of their time retouching photographs and stuff. Here, time is money. And if the lack of usability in the GIMP makes me spend 5 times more the time than I would with Photoshop (and i'm being considerate), it's just not worth switching. To put it another way, Photoshop's user interface _IS_ worth the price. I still can't believe the GIMP guys CANNOT make something as user friendly (or don't want to, which is worse). It shocks me and frustrates me.
A quote from a designer's blog:
Ooooh... what a bold statement! The GIMP is *NOT* user-focused. Don't tell me.
See, professionals don't want just "a better pile of poo" to do their imaging work. They (and I, too) want something that IS EASY TO HANDLE. Because in graphical applications, form is function. And this is something that many programmers (at least many of those that I've discussed with) simply fail to understand.
With the extra money in the pocket I can afford extra freedoms, Like being able to go to a movie, with my wife, having better food, nicer riding car... GNU is not free as in freedom is it free as RMS Tells you it is free. Life in a free society requires you to make choices, some of these choices are sacrificing one type of freedom for an other. If I chose free software all the time even if it is less of an overall value then I choose to loose the ability to use other forms of freedom. There is nothing stopping me from having GIMP and Photoshop on my same computer. So overall with Photoshop and the ability to use the GIMP on my system I have not loss any freedom. I support and applaud people who Make GPL software, they are doing a good thing... But if their tool doesn't work for me I don't want to feel trapped and not able to use non GPL alternatives.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Maybe there's a really good reason that Photoshop does things the way it does. It's designed for professionals, and hasn't changed a whole lot in at least a decade, so I gotta figure that for professionals, Photoshop is made to work the way most graphics professionals need it to work. The layer thing IS complicated, but from what little I know about graphic design, all of that stuff is very useful (necessary?).
I don't respond to AC's.
Because those people as usual either don't need a complex graphics applications nd therefore won't learn how to use it or have used unlicensed copies of PhotoShop for years and hate Gimp because it's interface isn't the same ("waaah, it's not the same menu, I have to use the second button of the mouse, the horror")...
The last time I used PhotoShop was on a MacII, before porting it to Windows was even considered. I've been using Gimp since the first release and never found its interface to be unusable. The Gimp is well documented and fairly easy to learn. I currently use it for my photo correction and retouching needs and it works just fine.
Like a poster mentioned above, I'm fairly sure I never could do as much with PhotoShop without spending a significant amount of time learning a new complicated piece of software. Which I'll never do because PS costs around 1000 €s in Europe and because it doesn't run in Linux anyway (which is what I happen to do my work in).
So Gimp and Krita suit me just fine (along with BibblePro and digiKam).
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
1. for some reason GIMP developers decided every single thing needs its own window and its own menu bar. It's weird as f*ck: put the entire layout in a single window with integrated panel layout (similar to how Eclipse does it, for example).
2. each plugin is its own modeless exe dialog that takes arbitrary amount to start after it was called (at which time you can modify the processed image.. sometimes, and sometimes GIMP crashes because of it): create a proper lean plugin API and modal plugin dialog.
3. the menus and options are all over the place: there seems to be no strategy at all about what goes where
I find these issues to make GIMP nearly unusable. I'm always fighting with it. How do you get around these problems?
Ok, some questions, then. What if an interface offered approaches more consistent than Photoshop's or GIMP's? For instance, in the main toolbox, both Photoshop and GIMP mix area selection tools (eg, rect, ellipse) with tools that actually modify the image using areas (eg, smudge, fill.) Because of this, the only way to know what a tool in the tool box will do is to become familiar with it; the location (in the toolbox) doesn't define the type of functionality. What if the area selection tools were in one toolbox, and tools that modified the image were able to be placed in another - perhaps just the ones you think you'll need today? In terms of usability, this type of approach associates physical location with function; this *should*, theoretically, enhance usability.
The same thing applies to layers. Photoshop's interface treats layers like they were not images, rather, as if they were only components of images. But essentially, they are images, as demonstrated by the ability to select one and edit it as if it was the image. What if a four-layer image allowed you to see, and edit, all four layers at once, just as if they were normal images, while changes to the sum of all the layers, let's call that the "master" image, are visible in yet another window? Wouldn't that be more consistent than treating a layer as if it were something other than an image? It provides direct, and simultaneous, access to everything at once (many layers begin to bring window management into the equation, but those skills are even more basic than anything inside an image editor.)
Before you answer, I would like to point out to you how many complaints that couch themselves as usability complaints refer to an application not working "like" Photoshop, and how often the phrase "industry standard" is brought up; it seems to me that when complaints of this type are voiced, they refer to learning the person has already done, and they want *compliance*, because they already have (a set of) muscle memory that they work with. They actually don't want better or easier, because better and easier is different, and different will impede their progress while they learn (if they are even willing to learn!)
I make decisions about these precise things as part of my job; I'd be very interested in specific opinions from anyone on these issues.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
I mostly agree, but I find item #1 to be misguided: " put the entire layout in a single window with integrated panel layout"
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If you want better window management, use a better window manager. Putting the window management features into GIMP would actually cripple the program for many of us. Photoshop's MDI is a great way to work around the limitations of the window manager in MS Windows. But it's still a kludge. A better window manager is a far better solution, and there are plenty of good solutions already available.
More details are in another comment:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24
Lack of user feedback is not the problem with the gimp. Users have being telling the Gimp programmers for years what's wrong with their UI.
The problem is that gimp programmers ignore all critism of their UI and likewise they will ignore this ridiculously complicated solution to gather user feedback.